The power of children

It's morning. The upstairs of my house is silent, so that means my wife and daughter must have already gone downstairs without waking me.

That means I got some badly-needed sleep and the usually frantic morning routine will be a little muted.

In short, it's a good way to start the day.

Then I get downstairs.

I see my little girl standing in the hallway looking at me. I say "good morning, kitten," and smile at her.

She says 'no!'

"But I was just saying good morning, baby girl!"

'No.'

It's like her default setting.

It's already looking like a very long day indeed. It turns out to be just that; deadline day at the paper is never a picnic. This one longer than most, for some reason. I can't figure out why; it just is. I am all storm clouds and sour grapes as I drive to the day care to pick up my just-turned-two little girl, and as I turn the corner, a giant semi sits wedged into the intersection, the driver having woefully misjudged just how much space he really had to make the turn. I sit and I wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Fourteen minutes later, the semi's driver gets his rig unstuck. The storm clouds are now full-bore hurricane clouds and my day, which went down the tubes hours ago, is now on a non-refundable plane ticket to crazytown.

Or possibly Toronto.

Don't know which would be worse, though. Going nuts or going to Toronto; all I could think at that particular moment in time was how bitterly cold and hopelessly grey the sky was and how much I would just like to fast-forward the calendar to, say, the middle of April, with its sunshine and warm weather.

Who am I kidding? At this rate, we'll have six inches of water in the basement by April.

It's official; I have the February blahs and I just don't know how long they're going to stay. All this goes through my head in the thirty metres or so of street I have left before pulling into my daughter's day care. By now, the theoretical storm clouds hanging over my head have encompassed most of Pointe Claire and I have had it up to here with people demanding things of me – so naturally I sort of fear the notion of tending to the World's Most Demanding Toddler for the next two hours before her mother arrives home on the train. I open the door with reticence, with the storm clouds gathering and multiplying and daddy set to burst like a thunderclap.

It never happens.

My daughter, who was so grumpy and so off-putting in the early part of the day, runs up to me with a huge grin on her face, hollering 'Daddy! Daddy!' and wrapping her arms around me. The storm clouds are gone. The bad mood is history, and suddenly looking after my daughter for the next two hours is something to relish and look forward to. It's a powerful thing, and all the self-serving time-wasting I would otherwise be doing seems trivial and unnecessary. My daughter is hugging me and I'm over the moon about it. What a great day.